The Grass Was Always Browner

The Grass Was Always Browner is a memoir of growing up and away from an eccentric family in a regular Sydney suburban backyard, travelling all the way to the Outback and on to London wearing pink pointe ballet shoes. Girls born in suburban Sydney in the 70s were rarely called Sacha. Particularly girls destined to be ballet dancers. Overcoming her real, ordinary-as, insufficiently Russian name was the first of many trials Sacha had to endure growing up, including the wearing of No Frills brown socks, white frizzy hair and a flat-as-a-pancake chest. Probably the most valuable trial was learning that suppositories can make you vomit and aren't a reliable cure for asthma, something that Sacha in turn had to teach the local doctors. And just as well, because without that valuable lesson the doctors would never have put their heads together to come up with an alternative treatment that involved neither suppositories nor vomit. Instead Sacha got to learn ballet, learning to pull up and turn out, and from there, life itself began to pull up. Taking to ballet despite a build that was all wrong, thanks to ill-advised addictions to Nestle's pink milk and sugar laden home-made lemonade, Sacha goes on to become something of a dancing star and no-one is more surprised than her teacher, the legendary Mrs P - an actual Russian. But there's a dark side to success for Sacha and more lessons must be learned on and off the stage, including that the greenroom of the Sydney Opera House is not actually green ... All this unlikely learning makes The Grass was Always Browner a romp of a memoir and a cautionary tale of the be-careful-what-you-wish-for variety.